school of anthropologists, led by the veteran Holmes, has successfully combated all claims to an interglacial man in America, but this negative result is difficult to harmonize with the cultural career of the aborigines we have just sketched. No doubt it was the consciousness of this that led Boas[1] to formulate the dissenting view: viz., that man reached the New World during an interglacial period. Many investigators agree that ten to twenty thousand years is all that can be allotted for the lapse of time since the last retreat of the ice in the New World. This, of itself, might give time enough to account for the growth of American culture, but the ice receded gradually, in fact, still hangs about the connecting bridge, so that a much more recent date must be set for the last opening of communication. Reference to our chapter on chronology will show that this leaves a very narrow margin for the development of aboriginal culture. Yet, exactly the same difficulty confronts us in the Old World, for it is clear that the earlier phases of Egyptian development also leave us a narrow margin, if we assume that all the higher cultures we know were developed since the dawn of the Neolithic in Europe. The important difference, however, lies in that whereas we know that man was even at that time a very old inhabitant of the vicinity, his corresponding presence in the New World is denied. Thus, if we accept the theory that man first reached America after the opening of the ice in Alaska, we are under the necessity of assuming a sudden unprecedented growth of culture, unless it turns out that the lapse of time has been greatly underestimated. It seems far more consistent with the facts to assume that the peopling of the New World was contemporaneous with that of Western Europe, and that the subsequent return of the ice practically isolated the two hemispheres, leaving each to develop as it might.
If we leave out of account everything below the Tropic of Cancer, a certain parallelism appears between western Europe and eastern North America, though far more strongly accentuated in the former. The Crô-Magnon man, who appears rather abruptly in western Europe, has in his disharmonic face, one of the most prominent New World characters, and
- ↑ Boas, 1912. I.
