1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [84]
To McGee, one of the worst 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.
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.
Aleš Hrdli