Abstract
SEARCH for evidence bearing on the problem of early man in America, which has been carried on in New Mexico during the past five years by Mr. Edgar B. Howard under the auspices of the Academy of Natural Sciences and the University Museum, Philadelphia, is now to be extended farther afield. When it was announced a few years ago that the stone implements of a type hitherto unknown in America, but now known as ‘Folsom points', had been discovered near Folsom, New Mexico, by Prof. E. B. Renaud, of the University of Denver, a new orientation was given to the study of American archaeology, more especially in the attitude towards alleged associations of artefacts with the bones of extinct or presumedly early fauna. An antiquity for man in America greater than that generally admitted seemed a possibility. Mr. Howard's explorations in New Mexico, of which an account is to appear in the Museum Journal (Philadelphia), and especially his discoveries in a cave west of Carlsbad and in old lake beds near Clovis, New Mexico, at a depth of eight feet, of artefacts and traces of camp fires in association with the remains of extinct faunacamels, wild horse, elephantsindicate that Folsom man had penetrated to the south-west in Pleistocene times, when the Wisconsin ice-sheet was waning, a period of climatic change tentatively fixed at 10,000 years ago. No contemporary human remains have been found. Mr. Howard is of the opinion that further evidence must be sought in Asia, and is now on his way, with the assistance of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, to Russia, where he proposes to study the archaeology of Siberia and hopes to enlist the co-operation of the Soviet authorities in further exploration. In the meantime, Dr. F. de Laguna, also on behalf of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, has resumed her researches in Alaskaon this occasion in the Yukon Valley and with the object of tracking Folsom man on his way to the south-west.
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Origins of Man in America. Nature 136, 175 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136175b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136175b0