1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

  C. C. Abbott

  (Illustration Credit 5.1)

  William Henry Holmes

  (Illustration Credit 5.2)

  Unsurprisingly, Christian leaders rejected Abbott’s claims, which (to repeat) contradicted both Ussher’s chronology and the theologically convenient Lost Tribes theory. More puzzling, at least to present-day eyes, were the equally vehement objections voiced by professional archaeologists and anthropologists, especially those at the Smithsonian Institution, which had established a Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. According to David J. Meltzer, a Southern Methodist University archaeologist who has written extensively about the history of his field, the bureau’s founders were determined to set the new disciplines on a proper scientific footing. Among other things, this meant rooting out pseudoscience. The bureau dispatched William Henry Holmes to scrutinize the case for Pleistocene proto-Indians.

  Holmes was a rigorous, orderly man with, Meltzer told me, “no sense of humor whatsoever.” Although Holmes in no way believed that Indians were descended from the Lost Tribes, he was also unwilling to believe that Indians or anyone else had inhabited the Americas as far back as the Ice Ages. His determined skepticism on this issue is hard to fathom. True, many of the ancient skeletons in Europe were strikingly different from those of contemporary humans—in fact, they were Neanderthals, a different subspecies or species from modern humans—whereas all the Indian skeletons that archaeologists had seen thus far looked anatomically modern. But why did this lead Holmes to assume that Indians must have migrated to the Americas in the recent past, a view springing from biblical chronology? Underlying his actions may have been bureau researchers’ distaste for “relic hunters” like Abbott, whom they viewed as publicity-seeking quacks.

  Holmes methodically inspected half a dozen purported Ice Age sites, including Abbott’s farm. In each case, he dismissed the “ancient artifacts” as much more recent—the broken pieces and cast-asides of Indian workshops from the colonial era. In Holmes’s sardonic summary, “Two hundred years of aboriginal misfortune and Quaker inattention and neglect”—this was a shot at Abbott, a Quaker—had transformed ordinary refuse that was at most a few centuries old into a “scheme of cultural evolution that spans ten thousand years.”

  The Bureau of American Ethnology worked closely with the United States Geological Survey, an independent federal agency founded at the same time. Like Holmes, Geological Survey geologist W. J. McGee believed it was his duty to protect the temple of Science from profanation by incompetent and overimaginative amateurs. Anthropology, he lamented, “is particularly attractive to humankind, and for this reason the untrained are constantly venturing upon its purlieus; and since each heedless adventurer leads a rabble of followers, it behooves those who have at heart the good of the science … to bell the blind leaders of the blind.”

  To McGee, one of the most exasperating of these “heedless adventurers” was Abbott, whose devotion to his purported Pleistocene Indians seemed to McGee to exemplify the worst kind of fanaticism. Abbott’s medical practice collapsed because patients disliked his touchy disposition and crackpot sermons about ancient spear points. Forced to work as a clerk in Trenton, New Jersey, a town he loathed, he hunted for evidence of Pleistocene Indians during weekends on his farmstead. (In truth, the Abbott farm had a lot of artifacts; it is now an official National Historic Landmark.) Bitterly resenting his marginal position in the research world, he besieged scientific journals with angry denunciations of Holmes and McGee, explanations of his own theories, and investigations into the intelligence of fish (“that this class of animals is more ‘knowing’ than is generally believed is, I hold, unquestionable”), birds (“a high degree of intelligence”), and snakes (“neither among the scanty early references to the serpents found in New Jersey, nor in more recent herpetological literature, are there to be found statements that bear directly upon the subject of the intelligence of snakes”).

  Unsurprisingly, Abbott detested William Henry Holmes, W. J. McGee, and the “scientific men of Washington” who were conspiring against the truth. “The stones are inspected,” he wrote in one of the few doggerel poems ever published in Science,

  And Holmes cries, “rejected,

  They’re nothing but Indian chips.”

  He glanced at the ground,

  Truth, fancied he found,

  And homeward to Washington skips.…

  So dear W.J.,

  There is no more to say,

  Because you’ll never agree

  That anything’s truth,

  But what issues, forsooth,

  From Holmes or the brain of McGee.

  Abbott was thrilled when his associate Ernest Volk dug up a human femur deep in the gravel of the farm. Volk had spent a decade searching for Ice Age humans in New Jersey. Gloating that his new discovery was “the key to it all,” Volk sent the bone for examination to a physical anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička. (The name, approximately pronounced A-lesh Herd-lish-ka, was a legacy of his birth in Bohemia.) Hrdlička had seen the Neanderthal skeletons, which did not resemble those of modern humans. Similarly, he believed, ancient Indian skeletons should also differ from those of their descendants. Volk’s femur looked anatomically contemporary. But even if it had looked different, Hrdlička said, that wouldn’t be enough to prove that the ancestors of Indians walked New Jersey thousands of years ago. Volk and Abbott would also have to prove that the bone was old. Even if a bone looked just like a Neanderthal bone, it couldn’t be classified as one if it had been found in modern construction debris. Only if the archaeological context—the dirt and rock around the find—was established as ancient could the bone be classified as ancient too.

  Aleš Hrdlička

  (Illustration Credit 5.3)

  In the next quarter century amateur bone hunters discovered dozens of what they believed to be ancient skeletons in what they believed to be ancient sediments. One by one Hrdlička, who had moved to the Smithsonian and become the most eminent physical anthropologist of his time, shot them down. The skeletons are completely modern, he would say. And the sediments around them were too disturbed to ascertain their age. People dig graves, he reminded the buffs. You should assume from the outset that if you find a skeleton six feet deep in the earth that the bones are a lot newer than the dirt around them.

  With his stern gaze, scowling moustache, and long, thick hair that swept straight back from the forehead, Hrdlička was the very image of celluloid-collar Authority. He was an indefatigably industrious man who wrote some four hundred articles and books; founded the American Journal of Physical Anthropology; forcefully edited it for twenty-four years; and collected, inspected, and cataloged more than 32,000 skeletons from around the world, stuffing them into boxes at the Smithsonian. By temperament, he was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas, the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline of statistics—even such simple statistical measures as standard deviations were notably absent from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Hrdlička regarded himself as the conscience of physical anthropology and made it his business to set boundaries. So thoroughly did he discredit all purported findings of ancient Indians that a later director of the Bureau of American Ethnology admitted that for decades it was a career-killer for an archaeologist to claim to have “discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.”

  In Europe, every “favorable cave” showed evidence “of some ancient man,” Hrdlička proclaimed in March 1928. And the evidence they found in those caves was “not a single implement or whatnot,” but of artifacts in “such large numbers that already they clog some of the museums in Europe.” Not in the Americas, though. “Where are any such things in America?” he taunted the amateurs. “Where are the implements, the bones of animals upon which these old men have fed? … Where is the explanation of all this? What is the matter?”

  FOLSOM AND THE GRAYBE
ARDS

  Twenty years before Hrdlička’s mockery, a flash flood tore a deep gully into a ranch in the northeast corner of New Mexico, near the hamlet of Folsom. Afterward ranch foreman George McJunkin checked the fences for damage. Walking along the new gully, he spotted several huge bones projecting from its sides. Born a slave before the Civil War, McJunkin had no formal education—he had only learned to read as an adult. But he was an expert horseman, a self-taught violinist, and an amateur geologist, astronomer, and natural historian. He instantly recognized that the bones did not belong to any extant species and hence must be very old. Believing that his discovery was important, he tried over the years to show the bones to local Folsomites. Most spurned his entreaties. Eventually a white blacksmith in a nearby town came, saw, and got equally excited. McJunkin died in 1922. Four years later, the blacksmith persuaded Jesse D. Figgins, head of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, to send someone to Folsom.

  Figgins wanted to display a fossil bison in his museum, especially if he could get one of the big varieties that went extinct during the Pleistocene. When he received a favorable report from Folsom, he dispatched a work crew to dig out the bones. Its members quickly stumbled across two artifacts—not crude, Abbott-style arrowheads, but elegantly crafted spear points. They also found that a piece from one of the spear points was pressed into the dirt surrounding a bison bone. Since this type of mammal had last existed thousands of years ago, the spear point and its owner must have been of equivalent antiquity.

  The spear points both intrigued and dismayed Figgins. His museum had discovered evidence that the Americas had been inhabited during the Pleistocene, a major scientific coup. But this also put Figgins, who knew little about archaeology, in the crosshairs of Aleš Hrdlička.

  Early in 1927 Figgins took the spear points to Washington, D.C. He met both Hrdlička and Holmes, who, to Figgins’s relief, treated him courteously. Hrdlička told Figgins that if more spear points turned up, he should not excavate them, because that would make it difficult for others to view them in their archaeological and geological context. Instead, he should leave them in the ground and ask the experts to supervise their excavation.

  Figgins regarded Hrdlička’s words as a friendly suggestion. But according to Meltzer, the Southern Methodist University anthropologist, the great man’s motives were less charitable. Figgins had sent excavation teams to several areas in addition to Folsom, and had also found implements in them. Encouraged by the increasing number of discoveries, Figgins’s estimation of their import was growing almost daily. Indeed, he was now claiming that the artifacts were half a million years old. Half a million years! One can imagine Hrdlička’s disgust—Homo sapiens itself wasn’t thought to be half a million years old. By asking Figgins to unearth any new “discoveries” only in the presence of the scientific elite, Hrdlička hoped to eliminate the next round of quackery before it could take hold.

  In August 1927 Figgins’s team at Folsom came across a spear point stuck between two bison ribs. He sent out telegrams. Three renowned scientists promptly traveled to New Mexico and watched Figgins’s team brush away the dirt from the point and extract it from the gully. All three agreed, as they quickly informed Hrdlička, that the discovery admitted only one possible explanation: thousands of years ago, a Pleistocene hunter had speared a bison.

  After that, Meltzer told me, “the whole forty-year battle was essentially over. [One of the three experts, A. V.] Kidder said, ‘This site is real,’ and that was it.” Another of the experts, Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, took over the excavations, shouldering Figgins aside. After spending the next summer at Folsom, he introduced the site to the world at a major scientific conference. His speech did not even mention Figgins.

  Hrdlička issued his caustic “where are any such things” speech months after learning about Folsom—a disingenuous act. But he never directly challenged the spear points’ antiquity. Until his death in 1943, in fact, he avoided the subject of Folsom, except to remark that the site wasn’t conclusive proof that the Americas were inhabited during the Pleistocene. “He won every battle but lost the war,” Meltzer said. “Every one of the sites that he discredited was, in fact, not from the Pleistocene. He was completely right about them. And he was right to insist that Figgins excavate the Folsom points in front of experts. But Abbott and the rest of the ‘nutcases’ were right that people came much earlier to the Americas.”

  THE CLOVIS CONSENSUS

  Early in 1929, the Smithsonian received a letter from Ridgely Whiteman, a nineteen-year-old in the village of Clovis, New Mexico, near the state border with Texas. Whiteman had graduated from high school the previous summer and planned to make his living as a carpenter and, he hoped, as an artist. Wandering in the basins south of Clovis, he observed what looked like immense bones protruding from the dry, blue-gray clay. Whiteman, who was part Indian, was fascinated by Indian lore and had been following the archaeological excitement in Folsom, two hundred miles to the north. He sent a letter to the Smithsonian, informing the staff that he, too, had found “extinct elephant bones” and that someone there should take a look. Surprisingly, the museum responded. Paleontologist Charles Gilmore took the train to Clovis that summer.

  Clovis is at the southern end of the Llano Estacado (the “Staked Plain”), fifty thousand square miles of flat, almost featureless sand and scrub. Whiteman’s bones were in Blackwater Draw, which during the Pleistocene served as a wide, shallow regional drainage channel, a kind of long, slow-moving lake. As the Ice Ages ended, Blackwater Draw slowly dried up. The continuous flow of water turned into isolated ponds. Game animals congregated around the water, and hunters followed them there. By the time of Gilmore’s visit, Blackwater Draw was an arid, almost vegetation-free jumble of sandy drifts and faces of fractured caliche. In one of archaeology’s great missed opportunities, Gilmore walked around the area for an hour, decided that it was of no interest, and took the train back to Washington.

  The thumbs-down response stupefied Whiteman, who had already turned up dozens of fossils and artifacts there. On and off, he continued his efforts to attract scholarly interest. In the summer of 1932 a local newspaper reporter put him into contact with Edgar B. Howard, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, who had, one of his assistants later wrote, a “driving mania” to discover a Folsom-like site of his own. Howard had already spent three years combing the Southwest for ancient bones, crawling into rattlesnake caves and taking a pickax to rock faces. Intrigued by Whiteman’s curios, he asked if he could examine them that winter during his down time. Howard took them back to Philadelphia but had no chance to inspect them. A few weeks after his return a construction project near Clovis unearthed more huge bones. Locals gleefully took them away—one bowling-ball-size mammoth molar ended up as a doorstop. After hearing the news, Howard raced back to see what he could salvage. He telegrammed his supervisors on November 16:

  EXTENSIVE BONE DEPOSIT AT NEW SITE. MOSTLY BISON, ALSO HORSE & MAMMOTH. SOME EVIDENCE OF HEARTHS ALONG EDGES. WILL TIE UP PERMISSIONS FOR FUTURE WORK.

  Howard returned to Clovis in the summer of 1933 and systematically surveyed Blackwater Draw, looking for areas in which, like Folsom, human artifacts and extinct species were mixed together. He quickly found several and set to digging. Once again, the telegrams went out. A parade of dignitaries from the East trooped out to inspect the excavations. Howard worked at Clovis for four years, each time staffing the field crews with a mix of sunburned locals in boots and jeans and well-tailored Ivy League college students on vacation. “One greenhorn was heard upbraiding his Massachusetts friend for not having perceived at once, as did he,” Howard’s chief assistant later recalled, “that the purpose of a [local farmer’s] windmill was for fanning heat-exhausted cattle.” Windmills were not the only surprise in store for the students. The temperature in the digging pits sometimes hit 130°F.

  Slowly peeling away the geological layers, Howard’s workers revealed that Bla
ckwater Draw had hosted not one, but two ancient societies. One had left relics just like those at Folsom. Below the dirt strata with these objects, though, was a layer of quite different artifacts: bigger, thicker, and not as beautifully made. This second, earlier culture became known as the Clovis culture.

  Because Clovis was so dry, its stratigraphy—the sequence of geological layers—had not been jumbled up by later waterflow, a common archaeological hazard. Because of this unusual clarity and because Howard meticulously documented his work there, even the most skeptical archaeologists quickly accepted the existence and antiquity of the Clovis culture. To trumpet his findings, Howard arranged for the Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, to sponsor an international symposium on Early Man. More than four hundred scientists migrated to Philadelphia from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The symposium featured a full-scale reproduction, fifteen feet wide and thirty-four feet long, complete with actual artifacts and bones, of a particularly profitable section of Howard’s excavation. (Whiteman was not invited; he died in Clovis in 2003 at the age of ninety-one.)

  The most prominent speaker in Philadelphia was Aleš Hrdlička, then sixty-eight. Hrdlička gave Clovis the ultimate accolade: silence. Before one of the biggest archaeological audiences in history, Hrdlička chose to discuss the skeletal evidence for Indians’ early arrival in the Americas. He listed every new find of old bones in the last two decades, and scoffed at them all. “So far as human skeletal remains are concerned,” he concluded, “there is to this moment no evidence that would justify the assumption of any great, i.e., geological antiquity” for American Indians. Every word Hrdlička said was true—but irrelevant. By focusing on skeletons, he was able to avoid discussing Clovis, the focus of the conference, because Howard had found no skeletons there.*