180 The America)) (ieol(Hi)xt. Mimh, 1893 
MA]S^ AXl) THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 
An'tiqi'itv on Man in Eastern North America. 
By N. S. Shalkr, Cambridge, Mass. 
Some years ago after reading the most of the literature con- 
cerning prehistoric man in northern Europe, seeing the collec- 
tions of the remains which had been gathered and examining 
some of the most indicative localities, 1 undertook certain deliberate 
inquiries to see what evidence of a similar nature could be found 
in this country. The first point I endeavored to examine lay in 
a field which otherwise interested me, that occupied h^ our 
caverns of the Ohio valley. Noting the fact that primitive man 
had extensively resorted to the caverns of the old world and had 
left there extensive accumulations of bones, his own and those of 
species on which he fed, with many other evidences of his pres- 
ence, I expected to find similar deposits in our caves and rocks. 
A good deal of fruitless work led me to the conviction that cave 
dwellers never existed in the Appalachian district in the way the}' 
did in northern Europe. 
In 1869 I made extensive excavations at Big Bone Lick in 
Kentucky, partly with the hope of finding human remains mingled 
with the abundant bones of extinct mammalia which occur 
in the deposits of mud at that point. Here again T gathered only 
negative evidences which went to show that primitive man never 
hunted the elephant, the mastodon, the Ovibos and other large 
animals which frequented this region about the time of the glacial 
period, probably when the ice la}' over the region north of the 
Ohio. As this field would have been an excellent hunting ground 
for early man, as it was for their successors, the red Indians, and 
the frontiersmen, it seemed to me strange that I could not find 
a single trace of man below the level occupied by the living bison 
which evidently comes to this district in. modern days. In this 
superficial layer made up mainly of bison bones, I found a 
number of arrow or spear heads. It also seemed to me important 
to trace the remains of the "mound builders'" or early American 
Indians backward or downward to see if they graduated into 
those left liv vet earlier varieties of nuvn: with this idea in mind 
