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The thumbs-down response stupefied Whiteman, who had already turned up dozens of fossils and artifacts there. On and off, he continued his efforts to attract scholarly interest. In the summer of 1932 a local newspaper reporter put him into contact with Edgar B. Howard, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, who had, one of his assistants later wrote, a “driving mania” to discover a Folsom-like site of his own. Howard had already spent three years combing the Southwest for ancient bones, crawling into rattlesnake caves and taking a pickax to rock faces. Intrigued by Whiteman’s curios, he asked if he could examine them that winter during his down time. Howard took them back to Philadelphia but had no chance to inspect them. A few weeks after his return a construction project near Clovis unearthed more huge bones. Locals gleefully took them away—one bowling-ball-size mammoth molar ended up as a doorstop. After hearing the news, Howard raced back to see what he could salvage. He telegrammed his supervisors on November 16:

EXTENSIVE BONE DEPOSIT AT NEW SITE. MOSTLY BISON, ALSO HORSE & MAMMOTH. SOME EVIDENCE OF HEARTHS ALONG EDGES. WILL TIE UP PERMISSIONS FOR FUTURE WORK.

Howard returned to Clovis in the summer of 1933 and systematically surveyed Blackwater Draw, looking for areas in which, like Folsom, human artifacts and extinct species were mixed together. He quickly found several and set to digging. Once again, the telegrams went out. A parade of dignitaries from the East trooped out to inspect the excavations. Howard worked at Clovis for four years, each time staffing the field crews with a mix of sunburned locals in boots and jeans and well-tailored Ivy League college students on vacation. “One greenhorn was heard upbraiding his Massachusetts friend for not having perceived at once, as did he,” Howard’s chief assistant later recalled, “that the purpose of a [local farmer’s] windmill was for fanning heat-exhausted cattle.” Windmills were not the only surprise in store for the students. The temperature in the digging pits sometimes hit 130°F.

Slowly peeling away the geological layers, Howard’s workers revealed that Blackwater Draw had hosted not one, but two ancient societies. One had left relics just like those at Folsom. Below the dirt strata with these objects, though, was a layer of quite different artifacts: bigger, thicker, and not as beautifully made. This second, earlier culture became known as the Clovis culture.

Because Clovis was so dry, its stratigraphy—the sequence of geological layers—had not been jumbled up by later waterflow, a common archaeological hazard. Because of this unusual clarity and because Howard meticulously documented his work there, even the most skeptical archaeologists quickly accepted the existence and antiquity of the Clovis culture. To trumpet his findings, Howard arranged for the Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, to sponsor an international symposium on Early Man. More than four hundred scientists migrated to Philadelphia from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. The symposium featured a full-scale reproduction, fifteen feet wide and thirty-four feet long, complete with actual artifacts and bones, of a particularly profitable section of Howard’s excavation. (Whiteman was not invited; he died in Clovis in 2003 at the age of ninety-one.)

The most prominent speaker in Philadelphia was Aleš Hrdlička, then sixty-eight. Hrdlička gave Clovis the ultimate accolade: silence. Before one of the biggest archaeological audiences in history, Hrdlička chose to discuss the skeletal evidence for Indians’ early arrival in the Americas. He listed every new find of old bones in the last two decades, and scoffed at them all. “So far as human skeletal remains are concerned,” he concluded, “there is to this moment no evidence that would justify the assumption of any great, i.e., geological antiquity” for American Indians. Every word Hrdlička said was true—but irrelevant. By focusing on skeletons, he was