pip. K' 2?]'"* JOHN H. KERR RESERVOIR BASIN — MILLER 41 



climatic changes. Hunting, food-gathering societies are as dependent upon their 

 natural environment as any other mammalian species. Having developed the 

 techniques needed for exploiting the food and materials provided by a particular 

 ecological configuration, they are reluctant to migrate to territories where new 

 techniques will have to be invented or borrowed. They will move with a particu- 

 lar ecological area as its position shifts in response to climatic changes and 

 they will not push out from it into areas of markedly different ecology until 

 forced to do so by population and other pressures. 



MacGowan (1950, pp. 18 and 20) has written : 



Too many authorities have written as if early man made a free choice of 

 routes through Alaska and Canada. Actually, the animals he hunted chose his 

 routes for him — doubtless many routes. Unless he had learned to spear and net 

 fish, the first invader probably pursued a herd of mammoth or musk ox across 

 the land-bridge or over the frozen ice of later winters. . . . 



If you want to understand early man, and guess with accuracy at why he came 

 to the New World and how he happened to drift southward and eastward until 

 he fills it, you must think of him as a wanderer looking for food. Game lured 

 him on at random, and vegetation lured both beast and man. Man might eat 

 his way through caribou country, and come upon the bison of another area. But 

 the animal — and the man who ate berries and roots and wild grains as well as 

 meat — would move as the climate moved. The world has known many changes 

 of climates and shifts of rain belts. Some of these have been extreme — in the 

 Great Ice Age, for example— and some have been less marked. But they have 

 moved the forests and the grasslands, and animals and man have moved with 

 the vegetation. 



Insufficient study of the accumulated facts have indicated that early 

 man became so populous that he forced himself into undesirable por- 

 tions of the Old World, such as northeastern Siberia. Ecological con- 

 ditions during this interval are not Imown ; whether they were under- 

 going changes like droughts which compelled the large mammals to 

 migrate northward into Siberia with man trailing along or whether 

 similar conditions were taking place in the northwestern section of 

 the New World at the same time : all this is milmown. We do have 

 a lot of ifs and lohys to answer before we can satisfactorily indicate 

 and explain man's wandering up to Siberia and his subsequent crossing 

 over the land bridge into the New World. 



Today we have a few facts about early man and many guesses. Not so long 

 ago there were many reputable anthropologists who believed that the New 

 World was innocent of man before 1,000 B.C. Now most of them grant a foothold 

 at least 10,000 years ago to an enterprising savage — called Folsom man — whose 

 taste for travel was as great as his talents for making an exceptionally fine and 

 original type of stone spear point. Some say he came to the New World 25,000 

 years ago. A few daring students find traces of an earlier Australoid human who 

 may have seen the last glaciers taking shape. Well-informed opinion places man's 

 entrance into the New World between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. ... As we 

 go deeper and deeper into the past and reach the time when the glaciers were 

 waxing and waning, five or ten thousand years one way or another becomes a 

 matter of opinion. [Gladwin, 1947, p. 24.] 



