1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [85]
With his stern gaze, scowling moustache, and long, thick hair that swept straight back from the forehead, Hrdlička was the very image of celluloid-collar Authority. He was an indefatigably industrious man who wrote some four hundred articles and books; founded the American Journal of Physical Anthropology; forcefully edited it for twenty-four years; and collected, inspected, and cataloged more than 32,000 skeletons from around the world, stuffing them into boxes at the Smithsonian. By temperament, he was suspicious of anything that smacked of novelty and modishness. Alas, the list of things that he dismissed as intellectual fads included female scientists, genetic analysis, and the entire discipline of statistics—even such simple statistical measures as standard deviations were notably absent from the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Hrdlička regarded himself as the conscience of physical anthropology and made it his business to set boundaries. So thoroughly did he discredit all purported findings of ancient Indians that a later director of the Bureau of American Ethnology admitted that for decades it was a career-killer for an archaeologist to claim to have “discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian.”
In Europe, every “favorable cave” showed evidence “of some ancient man,” Hrdlička proclaimed in March 1928. And the evidence they found in those caves was “not a single implement or whatnot,” but of artifacts in “such large numbers that already they clog some of the museums in Europe.” Not in the Americas, though. “Where are any such things in America?” he taunted the amateurs. “Where are Aleš the implements, the bones of animals upon which these old men have fed?…Where is the explanation of all this? What is the matter?”
FOLSOM AND THE GRAYBEARDS
Twenty years before Hrdlička’s mockery, a flash flood tore a deep gully into a ranch in the northeast corner of New Mexico, near the hamlet of Folsom. Afterward ranch foreman George McJunkin checked the fences for damage. Walking along the new gully, he spotted several huge bones projecting from its sides. Born a slave before the Civil War, McJunkin had no formal education—he had only learned to read as an adult. But he was an expert horseman, a self-taught violinist, and an amateur geologist, astronomer, and natural historian. He instantly recognized that the bones did not belong to any extant species and hence must be very old. Believing that his discovery was important, he tried over the years to show the bones to local Folsomites. Most spurned his entreaties. Eventually a white blacksmith in a nearby town came, saw, and got equally excited. McJunkin died in 1922. Four years later, the blacksmith persuaded Jesse D. Figgins, head of the Colorado Museum of Natural History, to send someone to Folsom.
Figgins wanted to display a fossil bison in his museum, especially if he could get one of the big varieties that went extinct during the Pleistocene. When he received a favorable report from Folsom, he dispatched a work crew to dig out the bones. Its members quickly stumbled across two artifacts—not crude, Abbott-style arrowheads, but elegantly crafted spear points. They also found that a piece from one of the spear points was pressed into the dirt surrounding a bison bone. Since this type of mammal had last existed thousands of years ago, the spear point and its owner must have been of equivalent antiquity.
The spear points both intrigued and dismayed Figgins. His museum had discovered evidence that the Americas had been inhabited during the Pleistocene, a major scientific coup. But this also put Figgins, who knew little about archaeology, in the crosshairs of Aleš Hrdlička.
Early in 1927 Figgins took the spear points to Washington, D.C. He met both Hrdlička and Holmes, who, to Figgins’s relief, treated him courteously. Hrdlička told Figgins that if more spear points turned up, he should not excavate them, because that would make it difficult for others to view them in their archaeological and geological context. Instead, he should leave