• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Figgins regarded Hrdlička’s words as a friendly suggestion. But according to Meltzer, the Southern Methodist University anthropologist, the great man’s motives were less charitable. Figgins had sent excavation teams to several areas in addition to Folsom, and had also found implements in them. Encouraged by the increasing number of discoveries, Figgins’s estimation of their import was growing almost daily. Indeed, he was now claiming that the artifacts were half a million years old. Half a million years! One can imagine Hrdlička’s disgust—Homo sapiens itself wasn’t thought to be half a million years old. By asking Figgins to unearth any new “discoveries” only in the presence of the scientific elite, Hrdlička hoped to eliminate the next round of quackery before it could take hold.

In August 1927 Figgins’s team at Folsom came across a spear point stuck between two bison ribs. He sent out telegrams. Three renowned scientists promptly traveled to New Mexico and watched Figgins’s team brush away the dirt from the point and extract it from the gully. All three agreed, as they quickly informed Hrdlička, that the discovery admitted only one possible explanation: thousands of years ago, a Pleistocene hunter had speared a bison.

After that, Meltzer told me, “the whole forty-year battle was essentially over. [One of three experts, A. V.] Kidder said, ‘This site is real,’ and that was it.” Another of the experts, Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, took over the excavations, shouldering Figgins aside. After spending the next summer at Folsom, he introduced the site to the world at a major scientific conference. His speech did not even mention Figgins.

Hrdlička issued his caustic “where are any such things” speech months after learning about Folsom—a disingenuous act. But he never directly challenged the spear points’ antiquity. Until his death in 1943, in fact, he avoided the subject of Folsom, except to remark that the site wasn’t conclusive proof that the Americas were inhabited during the Pleistocene. “He won every battle but lost the war,” Meltzer said. “Every one of the sites that he discredited was, in fact, not from the Pleistocene. He was completely right about them. And he was right to insist that Figgins excavate the Folsom points in front of experts. But Abbott and the rest of the ‘nutcases’ were right that people came much earlier to the Americas.”

THE CLOVIS CONSENSUS

Early in 1929, the Smithsonian received a letter from Ridgely Whiteman, a nineteen-year-old in the village of Clovis, New Mexico, near the state border with Texas. Whiteman had graduated from high school the previous summer and planned to make his living as a carpenter and, he hoped, as an artist. Wandering in the basins south of Clovis, he observed what looked like immense bones protruding from the dry, blue-gray clay. Whiteman, who was part Indian, was fascinated by Indian lore and had been following the archaeological excitement in Folsom, two hundred miles to the north. He sent a letter to the Smithsonian, informing the staff that he, too, had found “extinct elephant bones” and that someone there should take a look. Surprisingly, the museum responded. Paleontologist Charles Gilmore took the train to Clovis that summer.

Clovis is at the southern end of the Llano Estacado (the “Staked Plain”), fifty thousand square miles of flat, almost featureless sand and scrub. Whiteman’s bones were in Blackwater Draw, which during the Pleistocene served as a wide, shallow regional drainage channel, a kind of long, slow-moving lake. As the Ice Ages ended, Blackwater Draw slowly dried up. The continuous flow of water turned into isolated ponds. Game animals congregated around the water, and hunters followed them there. By the time of Gilmore’s visit, Blackwater Draw was an arid, almost vegetation-free jumble of sandy drifts and faces of fractured caliche. In one of archaeology’s great missed opportunities, Gilmore walked around the area for an hour, decided