Abstract
ALTHOUGH it is established by the find in New Mexico of a Folsom projectile point embedded in fossil mammalian vertebræ that early man in America was contemporary with and hunted an extinct form of bison, the absence or ambiguous character of stratigraphical evidence and associations of a majority of finds of early American stone age industries hitherto have made it impossible to determine with certainty either their age or their place in a cultural sequence. The relation of the Folsom point, for example, to the Yuma type, which typologically is simpler or more primitive, remains obscure, though the finds recently reported from the south-western States indicate a possibility of establishing sooner or later a cultural sequence leading up to Folsom man, and this is brought nearer to being realized by the discovery of the so-called Sandia man, whose existence is inferred from artefacts found in the basal layers of a cave of the Sandia Mountains, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. These artefacts would appear to be the earliest relics of human purposive activity as yet discovered on the American continent. Here, during the past three years, numerous relics of an extinct fauna mingled with human artefacts have been found, of which the stratigraphic sequence has been fully established in recent excavations.
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Early Man and Pleistocene Deposits in America. Nature 146, 90 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146090c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146090c0