Horatius at the Bridge

In Europe, Asia and Africa have been found fossil men hundreds of thousands of years old-perhaps even a million years old. But not in North America. It seems likely that the first North Americans were Asiatics who crossed a land bridge which once existed between Siberia and Alaska. Fifteen years ago it was generally believed that this migration occurred very late in the Stone Age, only 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, perhaps even later. Claims of greater antiquity were inexorably demolished, and largely through the efforts of one man--famed, Bohemian-born Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution.

Harvard's ace anthropologist, Earnest Albert Hooton, summed it up this way: "Dr. Ales Hrdlicka has stood like Horatius at the land bridge between Asia and North America, mowing down with deadly precision all would-be geologically ancient invaders of the New World."

But in recent years things have got tougher for Horatius Hrdlicka. In 1931 the University of Minnesota's Dr. Albert Ernest Jenks investigated a human fossil turned up by a roadscraper. After long study he pronounced it to be that of a 15-year-old girl who had fallen or been thrown into a Glacial Age lake; he put her age at 20,000 years. Dr. Hrdlicka said No. He admitted that she had surprisingly big teeth, but could find no significant anthropological difference between her and recent Indians, did not seem to care about the geological evidence.

Even tougher for Hrdlicka are those mysterious creatures called the Folsom men, whose skeletons have never been found, but whose tools have turned up in abundance. "Folsom points" are weapons shaped like spearheads, with shallow grooves flaked out on each side. First Folsom find was made near Folsom, N. M., in 1926. The weapons were intermingled with the bones of long-extinct bison. Skeptical anthropologists first wrote off this association as accidental. Then Jesse Dade Figgins of Colorado, one of the Folsom pioneers, found two points actually between the ribs of a fossil bison. He left the exhibit undisturbed in the ground, summoned anthropologists to come and look. They did, and this time agreed that the bone-&-weapon association was authentic. The weapons were judged to be 15,000 or more years old.

A more recently discovered Folsom site in Colorado, the Lindenmeier site, .appeared on geological evidence to be even older. A point was found there actually imbedded in a bison vertebra. Dr. Frank Harold Hanna Roberts Jr., of Dr. Hrdlicka's own Smithsonian Institution, put its age at 20,000 years.

Dr. Hrdlicka still said No. Commentator Hooton changed his metaphor: "It now begins to appear that the perennial heroism of one Dutch boy at the dyke is likely to prove insufficient to stop the in creasing trickles of fossil man through the geological defenses."

Last week came another blow. Drs. Kirk Bryan and Louis Lamy Ray, Harvard geologists, having made an exhaustive geological study of the Lindenmeier site, published a formidable summary in which they concluded that its age was quite possibly 25,000 years.

Dr. Hrdlicka was still not ready to give up. "It's a delusion," exclaimed he. "It does not amount to a scientific demonstration. There are many things that look like [sic] and many things that do not look like, but there is no proof. The geology of the earth is not like writing or even hieroglyphics -it is vague and indecisive. ... I have stopped arguing." He was willing to concede man in North America 7,000 or 8,000 years--perhaps even 10,000--but no more.

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