Abstract
AT the St. Louis meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on December 30-January 4, Prof. E. B. Renaud, of the University of Denver, reported the discovery of a large number of stone implements by the Denver University Archaeological Survey of the State of Wyoming in the summer of last year. This survey is part of a comprehensive scheme initiated by Prof. Renaud for the inspection and, where feasible, investigation of the archaeological sites of Colorado and adjacent States of the southwest, which has now been in progress for some years, and has already achieved some important results. The present find, according to a report circulated by Science Service, Washington, was made in a series of what Prof. Renaud describes as river terraces along the valley of Black's Fork, in south-western Wyoming, and consists of tools, rejects, scraps and pebbles numbering nearly eleven hundred in all. The principal interest of the discovery, however, lies in the fact that Prof. Renaud has classified the implements into five groups, which correspond to the sequence of European palaeolithic cultures, Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian, etc. They are also said to correspond with the stone age implements of the Nile Valley. Prof. Renaud, in stating that this is the first time such a complex of prehistoric stone industry has come to light in North America, regards it as possible that the discovery “may be very significant”. In the absence of more precise data and the verdict of geologists and palaeontologists, which he awaits, it is not possible to arrive at a critical estimate of the importance of the discovery in its bearing on the antiquity of the stone age in America; but it is scarcely necessary to say that identity in type is not & infallible indication of contemporaneity in dating, and in default of support from geological evidence, identities with European implements previously recognised in the south-west have carried little weight in argument.
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Palæolithic Types in the American Stone Age. Nature 137, 266–267 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137266c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137266c0