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By Root 1990 0

geologists, Sir Charles Lyell among them, unearthed tools and Pleistocene fossils in an English cave. Twenty-one years before, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, a French customs officer and amateur scientist, had made a similar but larger find near Abbéville, in northern France. His announcement was met with ridicule, some of it from Lyell. A year after the British discovery, Lyell and other scientists went to Abbéville, decided that Boucher de Perthes had been right all along, and issued gracious public apologies. From that point on, the scientific consensus was in favor of an early origin of humankind.

Abbott’s finds, proselytizing: Abbott 1876 (“driven,” 72); 1872a (“so primitive,” 146); 1872b.

Bureau of American Ethnology: Meltzer 1994; 1993:chaps. 3, 5; Judd 1967. The Smithsonian’s brief history of the Bureau of American Ethnology is at http://www.nmnh.si.edu/anthro/outreach/depthist.html.

Holmes critique: Interview, Meltzer; Meltzer 1992; 1994:9–11; Hough 1933.

Abbott, McGee, and the Paleolithic Wars: Abbott 1892a (“The stones are inspected,” 345); 1892b (“scientific men of Washington,” 270); 1883a (“high degree,” 303); 1883b (“more ‘knowing,’” 327); 1884 (“neither among,” 253); Meltzer 2003; 1994:11–12; 1993:41–50; Cultural Resource Group 1996.

Hrdlička’s life work: Meltzer 1994:12–15; 1993:54 (“respectable antiquity”); Montagu 1944; Loring and Prokopec 1994:26–42.

“favorable cave”: Quoted in Deuel 1967:486.

Folsom: Meltzer 1994:15–16; 1993:50–54; Roberts 1935:1–5; Kreck 1999.

Brown’s announcement: Anon. 1928; Chamberlin 1928.

Whiteman: Anon. 2003; McAlavy 2003; Cotter and Boldurian 1999:1–10.

“driving mania”: Eiseley 1975:99.

Howard at Clovis: Cotter and Boldurian 1999:11–20 (“EXTENSIVE BONE,” 11; “One greenhorn,” 14; 130ºF, 15); Anon. 1932; Howard 1935 (I thank Robert Crease for helping me obtain this article).

Discovery of Clovis culture: Cotter 1937; Roberts 1937.

“So far”: Hrdlička 1937:104. Other skeptics were less careful. Writing in 1933, Walter Hough, of the U.S. National Museum, flatly claimed that “archaeologists now agree that there are no American paleolithic implements” (Hough 1933:757).

Lack of skeletons: Interview, Petersen; Steele and Powell 2002 (ten skeletons); Preston 1997:72 (interview with Owsley).

More than eighty Clovis and Folsom sites: Hannah Wormington lists ninety-six sites in the 1957 edition of her well-regarded Ancient Man in North America. But she describes some as small and uncertain, so I have hedged and said “more than eighty” (Wormington 1957). Grayson and Meltzer (2002) tally seventy-six paleo-Indian sites in the continental United States.

Cosmic-ray race: Crease and Mann 1996:Chap. 10.

Detection of organic C14 and halflife: Anderson et al. 1947a, 1947b; Engelkemeier et al. 1949.

First radiocarbon dates: Arnold and Libby 1949 (“seen to be,” 680); Marlowe 1999.

“You read books”: Libby 1991:600.

UA C14 lab and Haynes’s background: Author’s interview, Haynes; Feldman 1998.

Consistency of C14 dates: Haynes 1964.

13,500 and 12,900 years ago: I use the calibrations in Stuiver et al. 1998 (online at http://depts.washington.edu/qil/datasets/intcal98_14c.txt.). These calibrations are essentially applied to Clovis and Folsom in Fiedel 1999b:102. They have been attacked as based on unreliable data (Roosevelt, Douglas, and Brown 2002; Roosevelt 1997).

Beringia: For a general physical description, see Fiedel 1992:46–47. Although now a little dated, Fiedel’s book remains one of the best expositions of the basic issues.

Beringia insects: Elias 2001; Elias et al. 1996; Alfimov and Berman 2001; Colinvaux 1996.

Temperature rise: Alley 2000.

Ice-free corridor and 1950s investigations: E.g., Elson 1957.

“ice-free” and “700 years”: Haynes 1964:1412. The potential relevance of the ice-free corridor was first described in Johnston 1972:22–25, 44–45. I am grateful to Josh d’Aluisio-Guerreri for helping me obtain this book.

Pleistocene bestiary: Anderson 1984;