HBDLICKA] DISCOVERIES ATTRIBUTED TO EARLY MAN 13 
Some of the human bones recovered were not &quot; powdery &quot; but rela 
tively fresh, and in the words of Professor BoAvman: 
One asks at once how the bones could be preserved for so long a period. &quot;NVe 
are all familiar with the decayed condition of bones buried for even a short 
period of 20, 50, or 100 years. The bones of the Cuzco man are distinctly 
weathered, but they do not fall apart. They are so fragile that we broke some 
of them in excavation, though we used great care; yet they are sufficiently 
firm, or at least some of them are, to display a clean mark when scratched 
with the knife. On the whole their comparative freshness is striking in view 
of a probable age of 20,000 to 40,000 years. On the other hand, it must be 
remembered that human bones equally well preserved have been recovered 
from the shell heaps and kitchen-middens of Europe ; that human bones no 
more decayed than these have been found in far older glacial deposits in 
France, Switzerland, and England ; and that more important than the ques 
tion of state of decay is the question of conditions of burial. The position of 
the bones within the zone of weathering, the character of the material, the 
climatic conditions, and the state of the bones at the time of burial are all- 
important considerations which are discussed in the following paragraphs. 
The bones of the Cuzco man, as well as the related vertebrate remains, all 
show a certain degree of erosion as if they had been for a short time in the 
grip of a stream. The finer details are wanting and projecting points are 
moderately worn. The facts that only the projecting points are rounded and 
the finer detail lost on the more exposed portions and that the amount of 
erosion is small argues distinctly in favor of the freshness of the material at 
the time of burial. If the bones had been decayed before being caught by the 
aggrading stream, their more fragile portions would be worn, though not with 
out respect to exposure of more projecting parts. The projecting points are 
not necessarily the parts to decay more readily. It may be safely argued from 
these two conditions also that the bones were decidedly fresh at the time of 
burial, a condition favoring long preservation. 
The bones lay in the zone of weathering, that is to say in the zone between 
the surface and the ground water. At the time the deposits were forming over 
them they undoubtedly lay for a part of the time in the ground water and not 
in the zone of weathering. 
Finally Professor Bowman expresses his faith in the antiquity of 
the human remains as follows : 
The original plan of the expedition did not include excavation or detailed 
archseologic work, nor was any effort made to do highly detailed geologic work. 
It was essentially an exploratory expedition. Furthermore, I came to the 
study of the bones, and the gravels in which they were embedded, with grave 
doubts as to the value of the find. A rather extended reading of anthropologic 
literature bearing on the antiquity of man convinced me, some years ago, that 
almost all of our reported cases of buried human remains in North America 
are not authentic, or the arguments are not sound. I expected to find some 
doubtful evidence that would entirely destroy any supposed value the Cuzco 
material might have. Upon examination the geologic evidence appeared very 
convincing and the proof clear. At the least a detailed study of the physio 
graphic geology of the head of the Cuzco basin was demanded. When this 
study had been completed, I again returned to the bone locality, in a skeptical 
frame of mind, prepared to find some fact that would destroy my former argu 
ments. 
