NO. 1 CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN LATIN AMERICA 
3 
shadow of certain Pleistocene megafauna. He is thought to have 
existed as a simple soil member like any other animal or plant in its 
natural state (Jones, 1954). 
In the western half of the zone, Clovis fluted points have been re- 
ported from the Sonoran area (Roberts, 1944, p. 417, Di Peso, 1955) 
and in south-central Durango (Lorenzo, 1953, pp. 394—395). These 
can be compared to the culture of the Llano man who left the remains 
of a ''kill" near Naco, Ariz. (Haury et al., 1953, pp. 1-24) . 
In the eastern section a Plainview point has been reported from 
northern Tamaulipas near the city of Guerrero (Arguedas and Ave- 
leyra, 1953, pp. 392-393). This evidence suggests that Paleo-Indian 
hunters may have come from the high plains of North America and 
penetrated the northern portion of northern Mexico at sometime in 
the late Pleistocene. 
There is no specific evidence in northern Mexico that would permit 
one to say that the first man who walked on the soils of this land was 
a hunter, and that he evolved with time into a seed gatherer and fi- 
nally became a farmer. The rare evidence of fluted points may indi- 
cate (1) an occasional penetration of Paleo-Indian hunters into the 
homeland of an older desert culture (Jennings et al., 1956, p. 72) or 
(2) that both cultures, the Folsom-Clovis hunters and the Desert- 
Cochise gatherers, sprang from a still older and yet undefined culture 
(Taylor, 1956, pp. 215-234) and that the hunting and gathering 
emphasis of these two segments was determined by both temporal 
and environmental causes rather than a result of historical growth, or 
(3) that the Paleo-Indian hunter culture actually predates the desert 
culture in northern Mexico (Haury et al., 1953, pp. 12-14) . 
Most authorities associate certain Paleo-Indian chipping industries 
with the bones of Pleistocene animals and place these associations 
as prior to 10,000 B.C. Geologic evidence suggests that this was 
a time of alluviation and of arroyo cutting (Martin et al., 1961) 
caused by drastic climatic shifts from humid to arid. Yet there is no 
proof that this action was associated with either increased or decreased 
precipitation. Recent studies of pollen columns in northern Mexico 
and the southern portions of the North American southwest do not 
support the climatic shift hypothesis, as there is no apparent shift in 
flora associated with the geologic evidence of arroyo cutting. It 
would appear as though plant life in this area shifted very little 
and that consequently the extinction of certain Pleistocene fauna may 
not have been due to climatic changes, but rather to man himself 
(op. cit, pp. 84-86). 
The suggestion has been made that it was possible for Pleistocene 
