The malleability of humans' anatomy and physiology, as well as their omnivorous appetite, were other parts of the biological equipment that permitted expansion into varied environments—not just cold ones. They were adapted to cope with the stress of change, and therefore they could move from Africa to Europe and Asia. And once they added the necessary cultural achievements to their remarkably versatile biological heritage, they could take on the very ice that, over a million years, had exerted so profound an effect on them even from a great distance. The populating of the Western Hemisphere, one of the great adventures of all time, was just a late chapter of that wider adventure story, the peopling of the earth. Yet it would take a long time, filled with heated argument, before the world would believe that such an adventure could have taken place more than a few thousand years ago.
CHAPTER FOUR
GOOD-BYE, GLACIALMAN; HELLO, CLOVIS
By the mid–nineteenth century in Europe, the scientific scrutiny of very old things was eating away at what most people perceived to be the very foundation stones of European civilization. In England in particular, the correct interpretation of the Bible, the lineage of humanity, and our very place in nature were all being seriously called into question. For many, the fact that such issues were being raised was intellectually and even emotionally devastating.
At this remove in time, it is nearly impossible to understand how devastating it was. Middle- and upper-class Victorians were au courant with contemporary science in a way that Americans today might well envy, and the implications of new scientific discoveries were pretty clear and widely debated. Already, in previous decades, the faithful had had to face up to the fact that God had created animals that simply hadn't worked out and had gone extinct—that is to say, parts of the Creation were not perfect. Then the problem had arisen that the world was much older than Genesis seemed to say it was. Genesis now had to be regarded as a poetic way of saying that God had spent up to six separate ages, including the Pleistocene, preparing the planet for his supreme creation, Man, in about 4000 B.C.
Then, in 1859, thanks to a French amateur archaeologist named Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes and some things he had comeacross earlier on the Somme River, people had to reckon with solid proof that man himself might be older than the Bible would have it—indeed, that he was a creature of the ice ages (whenever that was, and nobody at the time had any way of assigning dates to the Pleistocene that were much more than guesses, but it had to be older than six and maybe more thousands of years ago).
Beginning in 1837, Boucher, who was a customs official in Abbeville along the Somme, began collecting from the gravels along the Somme canal chipped flints he found in association with the bones of extinct animals. The next year he put his finds on display in Abbeville and then in Paris, and within three years he had published a treatise titled, perhaps a bit ambitiously, Of the Creation. The reception of these efforts was cool at best, but Boucher, undaunted, went on collecting. He published another volume calling his finds antediluvian, and this time his reception was not merely icy but derisive. But by the mid-1850s, a couple of other men found what they took to be confirming evidence in Amiens and Saint Acheul, and French geologists began to come around to Boucher's view.
All this while in England, starting in the late 1820s with Father MacEnery's excavations, a few people were finding similar associations of stone artifacts and the remains of extinct animals such as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. But as mentioned earlier, cave stratigraphy was thought by most geologists to be almost impossible to sort out. After all, one investigator had found mammoth bones that were, he thought, clearly associated with an implement that was unmistakably from the time of Julius Caesar. So any such findings from caves were pushed aside. But in 1858, some fissures were found in the rock of a cave located on Windmill Hill that overlooks the harbor at a town called Brixham in Devonshire. The fissures suggested that this was a cave in which the stratigraphy had not been disturbed, and before long a high-powered committee of nationally renowned geologists was formed to provide direction to excavations in the cave carried out by a local archaeologist, William Pengelly. The excavations paid off: the following summer, in the fateful year of 1859, they found flint tools in earth that lay below a several-inch-thick floor of “stalagmite” in which and above which were the remains of “lion, hyaena, bear, mammoth, rhinoceros and reindeer.” It was indisputable: humans had lived during the lives of what were by then perceived as Ice Age animals.
One of the committee directing the excavation at Brixham Cave, a geologist named William Falconer, had found himself in the summer of 1858 near Abbeville and had gone over to have a look at Boucher's finds. He had found them, as well as Boucher's conclusions, believable and, on returning to London, urged others of the Brixham committee to have a look for themselves. In 1859, they did so and vindicated Boucher. (This ushered in a new feature in archaeological studies—the site visit, usually by a select group of bigwigs in the field, or what one American wag far off in the future would label the “paleo-police.”) In that same year, members of the Brixham committee delivered papers at scientific meetings announcing the antiquity of mankind in “this portion of the globe,” and later the ultimate arbiter, Charles Lyell, in a presidential address at a meeting of the Royal Society, announced that he was “fully prepared to corroborate the conclusions” of his colleagues.
If that was not enough to satisfy any scientific holdouts, the unflappable and assiduous Boucher continued his efforts in the gravels of the Somme and in 1863 came up with a complete human jaw and some teeth unmistakably associated with tools of worked flint. The town of Abbeville unveiled a statue of this famous customs official in 1908. By 1859, however, the chasm between the ancient world and Bishop Ussher's moment of human creation had been eliminated.
To make matters worse in 1859 for people who still considered the seven days of Genesis the literal, or at least poetic, truth, Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species. This landmark book in all the history of science threw the world for a complete loop by stating that animal species had arisen via natural causes. An analogous intellectual shock today would be hard to pinpoint, but it might be equivalent to showing physicists that energy simply doesn't exist. But matters were soon made even more unpalatable for many. Though Darwin did not say much about it in Origin of Species, it soon became clear that he and other evolutionary thinkers were implying that human beings had descended from apes. (In fact, we aren't; today it is clear that humans and apes descended from a common ancestor.)
Within four years of Darwin's exposition, many other treatises appeared in the same vein. Thomas Huxley, an especially eloquent student of nature, was forcefully raising the ape issue, and in 1863 the grand old man of geology, Charles Lyell, published Geological Evidences for the Antiquityof Man, which put an end to virtually all lingering scientific doubts about the evidence of men among the mammoths. And these Ice Age people, as primitive as they seemed from their crude stone implements, were now taken to be directly ancestral to modern Europeans and not some race utterly—and comfortingly—separated from Europeans by some catastrophe like a worldwide flood. Not only that, but shortly before Darwin's momentous insights, the hunched, thick-headed, seemingly misshapen hulk known as Neanderthal Man had arrived on the scene, his remains recovered in 1857 from a quarry in Germany.
This Neanderthal being, according to one somewhat biased Continental observer, was either a deformed idiot or a Russian. Others saw it as some far more ancient, brutish being on the evolutionary path from ape to human. Before long, with the discovery of many more remains, most observers believed Neanderthals to be ancient, not anywhere near as brutish as on first impression, and indeed a fairly close evolutionary step in our direction. (It is notable that today, with all our brilliant technology and sophisticated ways of looking at such remains, no one yet can say for certain if the Neanderthals—now seen by many as a human subspecies called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis— who dwelled in Europe and
the NearEast from well before 100,000 years to as late as 25,000 years ago disappeared from competition with Cro-Magnon Man—Homo sapiens sapiens— or interbred with these newer and seemingly brighter arrivals and vanished into our gene pool.)
Recent reconstruction of a Neanderthal depicting the modernity of the species.
In any event, soon enough the notion became widely understood by European scientists of many stripes—geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists—not only that humans had evolved biologically over a long period of time from apelike ancestors into their present human grandeur, but that human cultures had also evolved—gradually and certainly—from the primitive savage through successive stages to the pinnacle of human achievement: European civilization and, most especially, its incomparable Victorian English version. In other words, there had been cultural as well as biological evolution. And these several ologies, however upsetting they were to the pious, almost immediately coalesced into a solid and relatively uniform multidisciplinary platform for the scientific study of prehistory, the platform upon which it still rests to this day.
All of this crossed the Atlantic in short order to a United States preoccupied with slavery and secession and soon to be in the throes of the Civil War. Nothing much would occur in America in the fields of science, though armaments specialists would invent the submarine and the Gatling gun. A handful of Americans attended to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Louis Agassiz, the glaciologist who had left Switzerland for Harvard, thought that the possibility of a human presence in the world prior to (or contemporaneous with) the glacier was not unreasonable, but he didn't believe that Darwin's natural selection could replace the hand of God and create species. Furthermore, he summarily rejected the notion that all animals were descended from a single ancestor. Asa Gray, the nation's most distinguished botanist, on the other hand, became Darwin's strongest American supporter. Joseph Henry, the multi-interested physicist who was still secretary of the Smithsonian, issued instructions for antiquarians and travelers on what to look for in Indian country to see if people had lived in North America in ages comparable to those in Europe. This putative inhabitant of glacial times in America soon came to be called Glacial Man.
By the 1870s, the astounding revolution in scientific thought brought on by the Europeans had penetrated deeply into the awareness of Americans; amateurs and trained scientists alike scoured the landscape for signsof Glacial Man. They dug around in caves and shell mounds, they probed deposits of river gravel and slogged around in swamps. They found stone tools in such places, to be sure, but not in association with the likes of mammoths, or indeed any other Pleistocene animals. The stone tools themselves looked not at all unlike modern aboriginal specimens; in fact, there was no way to tell a truly ancient lithic tool from a recent one. Agassiz himself was finding extensive evidence of North American glaciation but no artifacts among the gravels and other glacial deposits.
Many people believed that if Europeans had had their Neanderthals and later their Cro-Magnon men, who had done exquisite cave paintings of Ice Age animals, the New World ought to have its own equivalent. It was merely a matter of looking more extensively. Before long, academic war would break out on the fields of American archaeology—a battle even more contentious than the one going on over the identity of the mound builders at the same time. Today, we think of the subjects that reside under the umbrella of natural history museums to be quiet, slow-moving, dusty perhaps, and hardly the thing to get all destabilized about. But in the decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the fields we are concerned with here saw some of the most ferocious disputes in the history of American science. This was the period when a paleontologist at Yale, Othniel C. Marsh, waged a bitter struggle with his counterpart at the Smithsonian, Edward Cope, over finding, identifying, retrieving, and understanding dinosaurs, a long-term dispute that involved accusations of fraud, cheating, and other ungentlemanly activities, and was played out with the intensity of a Kentucky blood feud.
The mound-builder controversies were tame by comparison. They were driven by preconceived views about the identity and character of the contemporary native populations and a host of other (irrelevant) considerations and biases, resolved only after years of painstaking effort using increasingly sophisticated archaeological techniques. Unlike the battles over dinosaurs by the two most powerful professional paleontologists, the mound-builder disputes were chiefly between amateurs and the trained archaeologists, who were just coming into their own as a profession. And while American archaeology was developing a more scientific approach in the years between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century, it nonetheless lagged far behind the field as practiced by Europeans. It is fair to saythat American archaeologists at this time plowed ahead, for the most part following their own lights, only occasionally peering over their shoulders at their cooler and more generally methodical counterparts in the Old World.
THE PALEOLITHIC IN EUROPE
As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, the more or less systematic collection of prehistoric archaeological remains, or “antiquities” as they were called, was under way in several parts of Europe, notably Scandinavia. By 1806, the Dane Rasmus Nyerup, a librarian by trade and an antiquitarian by avocation, had amassed artifacts from all over Denmark and urged the royal government to create a museum for his and other, similar collections. Soon enough, the newly established Danish National Museum of Antiquities was literally filling up with artifacts, and scholars were trying to fit them into known Danish history.
Out of the disorderly mass of data soon emerged the idea of the so-called Three Ages System—stone, bronze, and iron. In the 1830s, J. J. A. Worsaae conducted stratigraphic excavations in Danish burial mounds and other sites and demonstrated that there was indeed a chronological succession in the manufacture of stone, copper or bronze, and iron tools. With the solitary exception of Jefferson's remarkable but unnoticed use of stratigraphy nearly fifty years earlier in Virginia, Worsaae's work was the first application of excavation by natural levels in the history of archaeology.
As a result of this Danish work, prehistoric archaeology now existed as a field of legitimate scholarly inquiry, at least in one corner of Europe. Not long afterward, the Three Ages System would become the temporal yardstick for not simply northern Europe but the whole continent. By the time the American Civil War ended, the terms Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) and Neolithic (New Stone Age) had been introduced. The Paleolithic was seen to be a very long period of indeterminate beginning when flaked stone tools had been used, followed by a much more recent interlude, the Neolithic, when ground and polished stone technology had made its appearance. Soon, geographically widespread and long-lived tool kits or “traditions,”such as the Acheulean with its highly recognizable heart-, lozenge-, or almond-shaped hand axes and rectangular cleavers, as well as more localized tool suites, or “industries,” were identified, described, and named—usually after the first sites in which they were discovered.
As Dave Meltzer has eloquently explained in several articles from which the following historical synopsis is partially drawn, soon European and, somewhat later, American scholars were familiar not only with the ancient Acheulean but also with later Stone Age (Upper Paleolithic) cultures such as Solutrean (for Solutré in east-central France) and Magdalenian (after La Madeleine in the Périgord, in southwest France). Shortly thereafter, archaeologists specified an intermediate, or Middle Stone Age, culture, called Mousterian (after Le Moustier, also in southwestern France), which became the name of the period when the recently discovered pre-modern creature called Neanderthal lived. By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of a long Paleolithic age, if not yet a household notion, had at least percolated across the Atlantic.
THE VANISHING AMERICAN PALEOLITHIC
In the early 1870s, two American men began careers that would make them major figures on opposite sides of a great archaeological chasm. One was a medical doctor, the other an artist. The
artist was William Henry Holmes, who, in 1871, came to Washington, D.C., to study art. There, like any tourist, he visited the Smithsonian, where he was sufficiently taken by a stuffed bird to sketch it. A paleontologist on the staff happened by, saw the sketch, and hired Holmes to draw fossils, which in turn were seen by Ferdinand Hayden, who took Holmes along as an artist on a major government-funded scientific expedition to Yellowstone the following year.
The young artist was soon made assistant geologist and, in numerous trips to the plateau country of the Far West, produced panoramic geological illustrations of the region that, according to one historian, “represent the highest point to which geological or topographical illustration ever reached in this country.”
Holmes was thus employed in 1876 when a New Jersey physician,Charles Conrad Abbott, published a monograph on the “rude” and, he suspected, Paleolithic-age stone tools he had found in riverine gravel beds near his family farm in Trenton, New Jersey (which is, in fact, quite close to the southernmost limit of the last glacial advance). In the quest for ancient inhabitants of the New World to match those of Europe, crude tools such as those of Paleolithic Europe were the next best thing to finding remains of humans associated with ancient faunal remains, and none of the latter had been found after a decade or more of frustrating search. The tools Abbott found were mostly hand axes, chipped by bashing them against a rock “anvil” or, alternatively, bashing them with another rock. In any event, they resembled the tools that Boucher had found along the Somme and that had been turning up in Europe ever since.
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