The antiquity of man in North America.

  • Alfred Russel Wallace
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The antiquity of man in North America. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Such cases as these remove all improbability from the celebrated Natchez man, a portion of a human pelvis from the loess of the Mississippi, which contains bones of the mastodon, megalonyx, horse, bison, and other extinct animals. This bone was stated by Sir Charles Lyell ‘ to be quite in the same state of preservation and of the same black colour as the other fossils.’ Dr. Joseph Leidy agrees with this statement, yet he and Professor C. Gr. Forshey maintain that it is ‘ more probable ’ that the human bone fell down the cliff from some Indian grave near the surhice. Sir Charles Lyell well remarks that ‘ had the bone belonged to any other recent mammal such a theory would never have been resorted to.’ The admitted identity of the state of preservation and appearance of the human and animal bones is certainly not consistent with the view that the one is recent, the other ancient, the one artificially buried near the surface, the other in a natural deposit thirty feet below the surface. Of a similar character to the above is the basket-work mat found in a rock-salt dei:>osit fifteen to twenty feet below the surface in Petit Anse Island, Louisiana, two feet above which were fragments of tusks and bones of an elephant. The salt is said to be very pure, extending over an area of 5,000 acres, and the formation of such a deposit requires a considerable change of physical conditions from those now existing, and thus of itself implies great antiquity.* These indications of the great antiquity of American man are now supported by such a mass of evidence of the same character that all the improbability supposed at first to attach to them has been altogether removed. As an illustration of this evidence I need only refer here to the Deport on the Loess of Nebraska, by an experienced geologist. Dr. Samuel Aughey, who states that this deposit, which is now believed by the best American geologists to be of Grlacial origin, and which covers enormous areas, contains throughout its entire extent many remains of mastodons and elephants, and that he himself had found an arrow and a spear head of flint at depths of fifteen and tw^enty feet in the deposit. One of these was thirteen feet below a lumbar vertebra of Eiejphas americanus.] We now take a decided step backwards in time, to relics of human industry within or at the close of the Glacial period itself. About twenty years ago a well was sunk through the drift at Games, a few miles south of Lake Ontario, and at a depth of seventeen feet there were found lying on the solid rock three large stones enclosing a space within which were about a dozen charred sticks, thus closely resembling the cooking fires usually made by savages. Mr. G. K. Gilbert, of the U.S. Geological Survey, obtained the information from the intelligent farmer who himself found it, and after a close examina- tion of the locality and the drift deposit in its relation to the adjacent lakes, comes to the conclusion that the hearth must have been used ■* Foster’s Prehistoric Paces of the United States, p. 5G.