INVESTIGATION VERSUS PROPAGANDISM 331 



To fill out a fair recognition of the inevitable mixing processes 

 to which the creek deposits were subject in the course of their 

 accumulation, several incidental activities should be noted, the 

 most important of which perhaps is the overturn of the trees 

 that grew on the bottoms; but this paper would grow tedious if 

 these and other incidental modes of mixing were discussed in 

 detail. 



h) Suggestions stimulated by the outer relations of the creek- 

 deposits. — Whatever the above suggestions might contribute 

 toward the interpretation of the crowded and mixed association 

 of the fossils and relics in the six feet of creek deposits, if put into 

 service, they would still leave no little apparent conflict of evidence 

 connected with the neighboring and also with the more remote 

 relations of the deposit. 



Geologists studying these outer relations, either from the 

 physico-dynamic point of view or from the regional point of view, 

 are confronted with difficulties that naturally cause them to hesi- 

 tate to believe that the time since the Vero Ridge was formed — 

 which is somewhat greater than the time since the creek deposits 

 began to be formed — can be the record of all that was done here 

 since the Early or Middle Pleistocene. Inevitably then the pres- 

 ence in the beds of extinct mammals that have been regarded as 

 evidence of these early stages raises a serious question as to which 

 class of criteria is the more trustworthy. 



Anthropologists naturally hesitate to believe that the Indian 

 type of skeleton could have remained without appreciable modi- 

 fication for forty-five hundred centuries — the minimum date 

 assigned the Aftonian stage in our tentative time-scale — or for 

 any notable part of that long period, and so on these grounds 

 also the question of the relative value of criteria is raised. In 

 this case, interestingly enough, the conflict of evidence takes the 

 form of bone against bone. 



The archaeologists are naturally still more hesitant to believe 

 that Indian pottery-making could remain in a static state for the 

 period named or any period measured by hundreds of centuries, 

 not to say thousands of centuries, for when a plastic art is set 

 over against the evolution of bio tic species, the presumption of 

 the speedier change lies much in favor of the art. 



